Why AI Needs to Pull Its Head Out of Its Ass and Get Bret Victor-Level Controls
Let’s get real: AI sucks at editing. Sure, it can spit out rough drafts—cool faces, surreal landscapes, or random game ideas—but when you try to refine that output? Forget it. You’re left yelling at the screen, “No, AI, I said tweak the lighting, not turn my Roman villa into a goddamn UFO hangar!”

This is a problem. A big, hairy problem. If AI can’t do high-fidelity editing, it’s not a tool—it’s a toy. What we need are controls that give us real power over the details, like sliders, dials, and live previews. We need Bret Victor-level genius design to take AI from half-baked gimmick to something useful.

AI Can’t Handle Nuance
Here’s the thing: AI can generate stuff. But the second you try to make a specific change—like, “Make this face look more Emily Blunt and less John de Lancie”—it completely craps the bed.

Why? Because that kind of adjustment isn’t simple. It’s about tweaking hundreds of tiny details: bone structure, skin texture, eye shape, expression, all working together. AI doesn’t understand this. It just guesses, throwing random changes at you and hoping one sticks. And if it doesn’t? Tough shit. You’re stuck regenerating until you want to scream.

What Would Bret Victor Do?
Bret Victor is the guy who made interfaces magical. He believes tools should be intuitive and interactive, like molding clay. Want a face to look more masculine? You should drag a slider and see it happen in real-time. Want a Roman villa to look older? Click, tweak, done.

AI needs this—sliders for everything, from "feminine-masculine" to "Emily Blunt-to-John de Lancie." But right now, we’re stuck yelling vague prompts into the void and crossing our fingers. It’s clunky, frustrating, and frankly, pathetic.

The Meta-Topological Nightmare
Even with sliders, some edits might be impossible. Why? Because AI deals in meta-topological variables—complex, interconnected traits we don’t know how to control yet.

“Make this look like Emily Blunt” isn’t just one variable; it’s a web of subtle features. And right now, AI doesn’t know how to disentangle them. You tweak the nose, and suddenly the eyes are all wrong. You fix the eyes, and the mouth goes to hell. It’s like trying to balance a stack of Jenga blocks in a windstorm.

Teachers Are Getting Screwed
Let’s talk education. Teachers are overworked, underpaid, and now we’re expecting them to design educational games? Seriously?

Even if AI generates a decent game, editing it is a nightmare. Want to make a physics simulation simpler for younger students? The AI deletes half the mechanics. Want to make dialogue less sarcastic? Boom, the NPC stops talking entirely.

Teachers don’t have time for this bullshit. They need tools that are fast, precise, and intuitive. If AI can’t deliver that, it’s worse than useless—it’s wasting their time.

The Ugly Truth
Here’s the hard part: maybe AI will never get good at this. Some things, like “make this 40% more Emily Blunt,” might be too complex. AI doesn’t understand nuance, and it’s not clear it ever will.

If that’s true, AI will stay stuck as a rough-draft generator—great for inspiration, terrible for actual work. And that’s not good enough for education, art, or anything that matters.

What Needs to Change
If AI’s going to fix this, it needs to do three things:

Give Us Sliders: Every key variable—gender, style, tone—should be directly manipulable with real-time feedback.
Understand Meta-Variables: AI has to learn what complex traits like “Emily Blunt-ness” actually mean.
Collaborative Editing: AI should work with you, step by step, not just puke out finished products.
Until AI gets its act together, it’s just a flashy toy pretending to be a tool. And when it comes to things like education, we can’t afford to waste time with toys.

So yeah, AI, figure it out. We’re tired of this shit.